I recall, too, the insuperable difficulty of accomplishing the manual tasks imposed upon me, especially that of sewing on my buttons—­how every few seconds the needle would slip through my fingers, till the thread was tangled up in a veritable spider’s web, while the button hung as loose as ever, to the derision of my companions and the disgust of the drill-sergeant, whose contemptuous—­“You may be a great hand at rhyming, but when it comes to sewing on buttons you’re a hundred years behind the times,” seemed to exile me to the depths of the eighteenth century.

I see the great refectory, where a battalion might have drilled; I see the long tables, the five hundred heads bent above the plates, the rapid motion of five hundred forks, of a thousand hands and sixteen thousand teeth; the swarm of servants running here and there, called to, scolded, hurried, on every side at once; I hear the clatter of dishes, the deafening noise, the voices choked with food crying out:  “Bread—­bread!” and I feel once more the formidable appetite, the herculean strength of jaw, the exuberant life and spirits of those far-off days.

The scene changes, and I see myself locked in a narrow cell on the fifth floor, a jug of water at my side, a piece of black bread in my hand, with unkempt hair and unshorn chin, and the image of Silvio Pellico before me; condemned to ten days’ imprisonment for having made an address of thanks to the professor of chemistry on the occasion of his closing lecture, thereby committing an infraction of article number so-and-so of the regulation forbidding any cadet to speak in public in the name of his companions.  And to this day I can hear the Major saying:  “Take my advice and never let your imagination run away with you;” citing the example of his old school-fellow, the poet Regaldi, who had got into just such a scrape, and concluding with the warning that “poetry always made men make asses of themselves.”

Yes, I see it all as vividly as though I were reliving the very same life again—­the silent march of the companies at night down the long, faintly-lit corridors; the professors behind their desks, deafening us with their Gustavus-Adolphuses, their Fredericks the Great, and their Napoleons; the great lecture-rooms full of motionless faces; the huge, dim dormitories, resounding with the respirations of a hundred pairs of lungs; the garden, the piazza, the ramparts, the winding Modenese sheets, the cafis full of graduates devouring pastry, the picnics in the country, the excursions to neighboring villages, the intrigues, the studies, the rivalries, the sadnesses, the enmities, the friendships.

IV.

A few days before the graduating examinations we were given leave to study wherever we pleased.  There were two hundred of us in the second class, and we dispersed ourselves all over the palace, in groups of five or six friends, each group in a separate room, and began the long, desperate grind, cramming away day and night, with only an occasional interruption to discuss the coming examination and our future prospects.